Buying a laptop for Linux

The community here seems rather active & knowledgeable, so I thought I'd try asking here...

My current laptop (a Dell Inspiron 640m) is getting *cough* venerable, & must be getting close to the end of its natural life. I realised that some of the faster processors found in cheap 'oversized netbooks' (eg Intel Atom D2700 or D2800) are as fast as the 640ms. But I've had a frustrating (& ultimately not terribly successful) experience getting a GMA 500 netbook to work under Linux.

Does anyone know how good the Linux support is for the faster Atom processors (D2700, D2800, D525)? Or alternatively where would be a good place to find info on this?

You're question is a bit vague as you don't state a price, size, or use. I've tried googling general info 'coz I'm interested too, but as always, the results are spotty and outdated to the point of being useless.

The issue is drivers for the GPU and other peripherals (touchpad, wifi,...), and handling power-saving modes.

If you want to play it safe, get a netbook/laptop with Linux pre-installed. Asus, Lenovo and Dell (and surely others) offer that on some of their lines.

I was mainly worried about the GPU those Atom processors come with, having been burned on the GMA 500. I didn't realise there are still significant issues with other hardware. (Inspiron 640m's came with a wireless card that wasn't well-supported a couple of years back, but that was ironed out at some point...)

Most of the 'oversized netbooks' I was interested in are OEM (ie unbranded). The exception is Hasee, but AFAIK it's not well known in the West, tho it turns out there is some info on Hasee + Linux.

With D2700 or D2800 processors I think these are about as powerful as my current aging laptop, which runs Ubuntu very nicely (with 1GB ram). & some of the OEM/Hasees are <$300; so I could probably import one with little or no tax/duty liability.

If you want to get an Atom netbook, avoid the CedarView family (D2xxx and N2xxx) as they have a PowerVR GPU that doesn't work well in Linux (or Windows for that matter). Pick one of the previous generation (PineView) Atoms (Dxxx and Nxxx). Those have Intel GPUs that work fine on Linux.

Isn't AMD support good enough these days ? I got Ubuntu (10.10 or 11.04, early Unity, was very klunky, dropped it because of that) to dual screen on an E350 nettop w/o too much hassle, and everything else seemed to be working too (ethernet, wifi, usb, sound). I think Brazos netbooks are rather competitive with Atom, with a much better GPU, a similar CPU (no parallel threading though ?), but a bit higher power consumption ?Warning: I did *not* test ACPI or whatever power management is called these days. Wifi is a separate chip so check that your specific model is supported. Ditto for sound, surely. But both of those don't seem to be raising lots of issues these days.

Thanks for the linlap link - unfortunately with OEM products you don't know who the manufacturer is. And the less well known Chinese brands aren't there. So I guess I'd have to go by the hardware components.

My current laptop runs Ubuntu nicely, which is why I was thinking similar performance would be fine. I did try it with a Puppy a while back, and that too was fine - slightly faster if anything. There's no sign of motherboard or other problems, maybe I should just replace the HDD...